Victoria Kerezsi films as midwife Michelle Doyle cares for Rebecca Williams, in labor with her second child.
Photo by Jennifer Young-Canton

TROY >> About a year after giving birth to her first child, Victoria Kerezsi decided to make a short film about the city midwife who caught her daughter Hazel. She didn’t expect the story to take the dramatic turns it did.

Kerezsi teamed up with midwife Michelle Doyle to document Rebecca Williams’ pregnancy with her second child. Doyle cared for Williams during her first pregnancy with her son, Malcolm.

An ultrasound at the midpoint of Williams’ pregnancy found startling news — three major heart defects and Down syndrome. Doctors predicted the baby would not live more than an hour after birth, and Williams had to make a heavy decision.

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Williams decided to see the pregnancy through, and wanted her child to be born in the most loving way. She decided to take no more tests, have Doyle continue to care for her and deliver the baby in their home.

Doyle says she knew she wanted to be a midwife from a very young age. She is a registered nurse, and became a certified nurse midwife in 1999. Since 1983, she has attended more than 1,000 births and been present at thousands more. Doyle serves on the Board for the New York State Association of Licensed Midwives, and is a member of both the Association of Certified Nurse Midwives and the Midwife Alliance of North America.

Midwives don’t just help deliver babies in homes. Most who attend births do so in hospitals, and they also provide general care to women of all ages.

“Midwives use a model of care that is not just about providing the basics of health care, but doing it in a way that empower and educates the woman, and helps her make her own health care decisions and be her own advocate for her own health,” said Doyle, who moved to Troy 15 years ago and caught about a thousand births in hospitals in 10 years, with privileges at Samaritan Hospital.

In 2009, Doyle started her own practice, Local Care Midwifery, PLLC. Since then, she has caught 115 babies, many at home births. At the time, the two closest home birth midwives were in Hudson and New Paltz, but since then, several area practices have open.

Doyle says about 1 percent of births in the United States happen at home. Few reliable studies on the safety of home births have been completed in the United States, she says. But studies in Canada, the U.K. and Scandanavia have shown that home births are as safe as planned hospital births for the same group of women.

“It’s a big deal getting a human being out of your body,” said Doyle, who had her own three children at home. “For me and the majority of women who choose home birth, that’s where they’re drawn to let that happen, in the comfort of their own home.”

Doyle says she would like to see more area birth centers — where women who may not have safe or comfortable homes can go to have natural births with midwives. She says there are two in the state, and none in the Capital Region.

Some insurance companies will cover midwife services, while others will not. Total cost, before insurance, for a home birth, including prenatal and postpartum care, is $8,000, while an average hospital birth cost about $14,000, according to Doyle.

Doyle says mothering an infant can be overwhelming, and many women kind of lose themselves in the wonderful and exhausting postpartum weeks and months.

“It’s interesting for me to watch someone come back to find themselves again,” said Doyle. “So for me, that’s what Victoria’s film was really about. She’s an incredible filmmaker. I was flattered, but I really wanted to support her, because that said to me that she was looking to find herself again.”

When their short video suddenly became a complicated and seemingly dire story, Kerezsi questioned if she should keep filming, but Williams insisted her baby’s story should be told.

“I didn’t want to stop filming,” Williams said. “I knew that it was an important thing for Vickie to do, important work Michelle was doing, and then if something was going wrong with my pregnancy, it was the only thing I was gonna have.”

Kerezsi is originally from Media, Penn., and studied film at New York University before making a home in Troy. Her previous work has also featured women, including experimental and documentary series, “Eye AM: Women Behind the Lens” and a documentary triad about three elderly women, which she completed as a Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute fine arts master’s degree student.

The documentary tentatively titled, “Into Loving Hands,” is not yet complete, as Kereszi seeks funding for editing, color correction, sound mixing, animation and DVD creation. She has set up a crowdfunding website to ask for community support for the project, www.indiegogo.com/projects/into-loving-hands. The film tracks the final six months of Williams’ pregnancy, including a successful birth in her home to a miraculously healthy baby boy, Joey, who turns one year old this month.